Wednesday, April 17, 2013

My first balloon flight ended in a farm paddock just south
of the city. The quantity of manure on
the paddock was such that we needed to lay out large squares of plastic before
we could deflate and pack the balloon. I haven't seen so much manure outside of a cowshed yard. It was a graphic reminder of the reality of increasing cow numbers.

We are only now beginning to understand the extent to which
intensive stocking degrades the soil whereas the pollution of waterways from
dairy farm run-off is obvious. We
welcome the economic benefit from
intensive dairying but it comes at an environmental
cost and could be ultimately unsustainable.

This is a
recurrent theme in global and national conversations. I will be interested in the results of the
Waikato Regional Council’s recent survey
on attitudes to balancing economic and environmental considerations.

In 2006 Lord Nicholas Stern warned of the effect of global
warming on the world economy. The main
conclusion of the Stern Report was that the benefits of strong, early action on
climate change would far outweigh the costs of not acting. In February of this year he said that he
had under-estimated the risks in view of the rise of global temperatures. Scientists are predicting more extreme
weather events as a result of climate change and in this summer in New Zealand we have
experienced an unprecedented nation-wide
drought which could become the norm.

Nationally, the government proposes in the latest RMA
reforms to elevate economic benefit
above environmental considerations; the
discussion paper on Freshwater reforms, while having some positive aspects,
does not address the shortcomings of the ‘first in first served’ approach and
even includes the option of balloting for freshwater allocation. The Commission
for the Environment describes the current ETS regime as a farce. The Minister of Housing and Conservation
speaks of ‘jobs not environment’ , has
cut Department of Conservation staff numbers and in chasing the holy grail of
housing affordability fails to factor in the overall costs of urban
sprawl.

A group of prominent
New Zealanders, Wise Response, has
called for a cross-party approach to address the issues we face more
responsibly (see www.wiseresponse.org.nz and On
the Brink (Peta Carey) NZ Listener 13 April ) Massey
University’s Vice Chancellor, Steve Maharey in Defining
NZ 2050 (Jan. 2013) writes ‘now
is the time to arrive at a common vision of the sort of place we want New
Zealand to be and to set to work on making it a reality.’ To do so may involve some politically
unpalatable decisions in the short term but prove responsible in the long
term.

On a more
positive note, locally, it was
encouraging to see that the Waikato Times
of 23 March with eight articles on environmental topics, most substantial. And to hear John Innes from Landcare delight
the large Pechakucha audience at the Summer Gardens Festival on the topic of
birds and their predators.

The city’s Sustainable Hamilton Strategy speaks of changing
the way we live for a better future. We
will do so through working together and showing leadership to improve our
natural and built environment and reducing our impact on the environment through
a whole raft of actions. The Action Plan to implement the strategy is possibly
ambitious, necessarily multi-faceted and relies on ongoing commitment of
Council and our partners to do so. Establishing an external panel to monitor how we are doing will give us
an independent view on how we are tracking in a way that we might struggle to
do ourselves.

Council is
undertaking to take a more considered approach to sustainability through its own
Sustainability Plan.

We have now notified the Proposed District Plan which has
many inter-related sustainability
aspects especially around land use, water, energy, design, hazards and transport. In
addition to regulation , incentives and education are important components of
the approach taken in the Proposed District Plan.